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Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.
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>Meet Mike. Mike is a college freshman who is exposed to crypto through social media. He downloads Coinbase, buys ten dollars of CumRocket because his friend group is in on it, watches the price move, and feels for the first time the dopamine rush of gambling on non-economic random walks. By his sophomore year he is onto harder drugs: 0DTE options on triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs he does not understand, traded o…
- many people don't indulge at all
- many people indulge occasionally to no real harm
- some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess
- a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm
- a few people really mess up tragically
1.A tiny handful of success stories are pushed to the front.
2.The vast majority who lost money are made invisible.
3.It manufactures the expectation that this time, you could be the one.
4.The price movement itself becomes the reward stimulus.
5.The platform, the exchange, the issuer, and the early investors all hold an advantage in fees or liquidity.
The problem is that this is identical to gambling. But it's dressed up as "finance." The industry obscures the fact that crypto functions as gambling by making people think of it as a new kind of financial asset.
Of course, crypto is technology. It's true that there are technological components, blockchains, smart contracts, and the like. But just because something contains technology doesn't mean the mass marketing around it qualifies as technology investment. Anti-counterfeiting technology is also technology. That doesn't make putting money into circulating counterfeit bills an "investment in currency security technology." By the same logic, the fact that crypto contains technological elements is being used to justify the marketing structure built on top of it, and that, precisely, is the deception.
And for all the talk of decentralization, the reality that USDT and similar tokens end up tethered to a single dominant exchange, heavily coupled to nation states, essentially proves that true decentralization is impossible in practice. This is only natural. Decentralization makes trading inconvenient, so people gravitate toward a single centralized exchange. And at that point, what exactly is the difference between that exchange and a government?
Really wish we could go back to saying "cryptocurrency", it is incredibly depressing that the world has decided that "cryptocurrency" is more relevant than "cryptography"...
Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.
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You made it seem mysterious, but it's spelled out explicitly in TFA:
> the meticulously designed paradise she has been living in is in fact an engineered torture chamber
> The public's trust in markets is finite. Every dollar lost on a self-referential game labeled a market consumes a small piece of that finite trust, and the consumption over fifteen years has been considerable Yes, and not just in crypto. People have started to view a high-trust society like a rainforest: a natural resource that has lots of life-sustaining positive externalities, but you can just burn it down to mak…
I've never read this analogy before but it really works for me. Thanks!
>Meet Mike. Mike is a college freshman who is exposed to crypto through social media. He downloads Coinbase, buys ten dollars of CumRocket because his friend group is in on it, watches the price move, and feels for the first time the dopamine rush of gambling on non-economic random walks. By his sophomore year he is onto harder drugs: 0DTE options on triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs he does not understand, traded o…
Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.
> A shadow dollar system, newly blessed by federal statute, is quietly migrating the savings of the global poor onto the balance sheets of a handful of opaque private companies. I'm out of the loop on this one. Is he talking about some crypto thing?
When you go outside of the nice countries, local money becomes worthless. Nobody wants it, they'd much rather have dollars instead. Stablecoins for the first time offer a reasonable way for the global poor to store value in dollars, or in the form of any relatively stable currency. Obviously this comes with all kinds of issues, but it's still better than the original situation where "savings" simply didn't exist exce…
Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place . The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.
This is an interesting economic/philosophical angle. What is the logical conclusion of this? What happens as a higher fraction of people deploy their capital in zero-sum games? Is "deployment" even the right framing? A bet doesn't necessarily "tie up" capital in the same way as a real investment (you could place your bet moments before it's settled). Buying crypto does tie up capital, sort of, although in theory you could invest crypto-denominated assets into something productive.
My capital is in real estate and (mostly US tech) company equity. Is society actually better off because I put my capital there instead of letting it sit in a bank account or crypto wallet?